The following two numbered items
appeared at the dates indicated on different pages in
the original Around Naples Encyclopedia. They have been
consolidated here onto a single page.1.

entry
July 2003

San Carlo
Theater

San Carlo Theater in Naples has
always had a reputation for sounding good. It was
built back when the only rule for architects was,
"Imitate the construction of halls that sound good."
Not very scientific, but it worked. Thus, it was with
some trepidation that concert-goers at San Carlo
awaited the downbeat of Orff's Carmina Burana
in April 1992 on the occasion of the reopening of the
newly renovated theater. A collective sigh of relief
went up (heard quite clearly even in the back row!):
things sounded better than ever, according to Roberto de Simone,
noted Neapolitan musicologist and composer. It is just
one more chapter in the history of Naples' most famous
theater.

Today, of course,
most people, if asked to name the opera house in
Italy, say La Scala in Milan. That is true, but only
because times have changed dramatically since the
mid–1700s when Naples, in general, and San Carlo, in
particular, were jewels in the crown of European
culture. Naples was home to some of the great names in
Western music, such as Alessandro
Scarlatti and Giovanni
Battista Pergolesi. The city was also the
birthplace of the best-loved form of operatic
entertainment in the 18th century, the Comic Opera.

San Carlo was
built by the Bourbon king,
Charles III, and takes its name from the fact
that it opened on November 4, 1737, the feast day of
the saint the king was named for. The king, of course,
was present on opening night to see and hear Achille
in Sciro, with music by the Neapolitan Domenico
Sarro, who is now largely forgotten; the libretto was
by Pietro Metastasio, the great court poet to the
Emperor of Austria and to this day considered a giant
among librettists.

The festive
cantata which preceded the first opera at San Carlo
sang the praises of the new theater: "Behold the new,
sublime, spacious theater, vaster than that which
Europe hath seen." A few years later, the English
music historian Charles
Burney said that San Carlo "as a spectacle
surpasses all that poetry or romance have painted."
The architects of the new theater were Angelo Carasale and Giovanni
Antonio Medrano.

Among the best known
Neapolitan composers of the 18th century
were Pergolesi (1710-1736),
Domenico Cimarosa
(1749-1801) and Giovanni
Paisiello (1740-1816), all masters of the comic
opera, light-hearted fluff which featured lots
of fat old lechers rolling their eyes while they
laughed and chased virgins around the stage. The names
of a few of the works let you know just what you're in
for: The Servant Mistress, The Clandestine
Marriage, The Enamoured Monk. Comic
operas started out in the early 1700s as short
interludes between the acts of serious works with
Greek names, usually Achilles or Orpheus or one of
their relatives, names that show just how seriously
composers still took the Renaissance commitment to
revive classical ideals. Much of this music,
appropriately called opera seria, was as dull
as cereal; so, enter the rollicking street farces that
were to develop into comic opera. [A separate article
on Monteverdi and the beginnings of opera may be read
by clicking here.]

The Servant Mistress was the first full-scale comic opera and
was first performed in 1731 at the San Bartolomeo Theater in
Naples, the house that San Carlo replaced. It is
still played today and is one of the very few
Neapolitan comic operas still in the standard
repertoire. Hundreds were written and almost none
survive. They were done in by Romanticism. Fluff was
fun, but by the late 18th century, it had given way
to more serious things such as Revolution, Heroism,
Love, Courage, Valor and Beethoven. Neapolitan comic
operas, also, it is fair to say, suffer somewhat in
comparison to the comic operas of Mozart. It is also
fair to say, however, that most things suffer
somewhat in comparison to Mozart.

Recently, Naples
held a months-long revival of the music of Pergolesi,
many of whose works have not been heard since they
were first performed. Like many of his contemporaries,
he was a very versatile composer; his best known
composition, one which is still very much part of the
standard orchestral repertoire today is a serious,
sacred work: the Stabat Mater.

Another great
composer of comic opera was
Gioacchino Rossini (1792-1868). He was not
Neapolitan, but is intimately connected with the
musical history of the city, in that he took
over the role of "house composer" in 1814. It was the
beginning of the move away from Neapolitan composers,
but one that kept San Carlo in the mainstream of
European music, at least for a while longer. Rossini,
Vincenzo Bellini and Gaetano Donizetti, three of
the great names in Italian opera in the first half of
the 19th century, were all connected with the Naples conservatory and
San Carlo. Bellini and Donizetti were the bridge to
the new music of Romanticism, while Rossini was,
somewhat anachronistically, the link to the comic
operas of the past. For some reason, people forget
that Rossini was the first European composer to break
almost completely with the opera seria, works
based on Greek mythology, and to start using themes of
more immediate interest to Europeans, such as William
Tell, Lady of the Lake, Tancredi, Elizabeth-Queen of
Englandand many others, all dramatic
themes. Far from being just a composer of comic opera,
he was one of the founders of European Romanticism.

Rossini's The Barber of Seville,
is arguably the best comic opera ever composed,
Mozart notwithstanding. It was performed for the
first time in Rome and not in Naples. That may have
been a good thing, since there was already a very
popular work of the same name by the Neapolitan,
Paisiello, whose hooligan fans went to Rome for the
opening of Rossini's work just to make rude noises.
They say that even members of the cast(!) conspired
to make the premiere flop. The conspiracy worked so
well that Rossini got discouraged and didn't go to
the second performance; his friends had to hunt him
up and tell him it had been a hit. History, of
course, has since consigned Paisiello's work to the
list of operatic also-rans. Rossini didn't
take criticism or failure lightly. His attempt at
something a little more serious and in keeping with
the times, William Tell, was not well
received and he subsequently quit writing opera
altogether at the age of 37. He lived another thirty
years.

San Carlo burned to
the ground during a performance of one of
Rossini's works in 1816, but was rebuilt in a few
months time. It was even more spectacular than the
original. Stendahl wrote that he felt as if he had
been "transported to the palace of some oriental
emperor…my eyes were dazzled, my soul enraptured.
There is nothing in the whole of Europe to compare
with it."

By 1850, a
northern Italian composer had appeared on the scene:
Giuseppe Verdi. In spite of the prestige of the Naples
theater, the unfavorable conditions of censorship in
the Kingdom of Naples at least partially contributed
to Verdi's decision to take his operas elsewhere,
particularly after Neapolitan censors objected to the
regicidal theme of Un Ballo
in Maschera. Even after the unification of Italy, when
censorship was no longer a problem in Naples, Italy's
greatest composer still regarded Naples and San Carlo
as a provincial backwater.

By the late 19th
century, the emphasis in opera in Italy had for
political and economic reasons shifted to the north.
San Carlo was late in introducing the new music of the
day, works by Gounod, Bizet, and Wagner, for example.
Neapolitan composers such as Leoncavallo (I
Pagliacci) and Alfano (most famous for having
finished Puccini's last work, Turandot ) went
elsewhere to live and work. Arturo Toscanini took over
the direction of La Scala in Milan in 1899 and assured
that city's supremacy in the world of opera.

San Carlo has
since continued to go its own peculiar way. In 1901, a
young Neapolitan, Enrico
Caruso, sang the role of Nemorino in Donizetti's
L'elisir d'amore. If you go to Caruso's house
in Naples today and see that it has become
something of a shrine, you might well forget that the
voice subsequently judged the greatest operatic tenor
in history didn't go over well with the hometown
crowd. He got a bad review
in the papers and vowed never to sing in Naples again.
He kept his promise. He went to America and became one
of the "tired, poor, and huddled masses, yearning" —to
record for RCA.

San Carlo
has recently undergone an overhaul like none in its
history. There are new electrical systems, new
public lifts and stage elevators, extensive
fireproof reupholstering and smoke detectors with
spray extinguishers. Thus, new life has been granted
to a venerable institution. It is not common, you
know, to find places of culture, such as San Carlo,
in continuous operation for two-and-a-half
centuries, anymore than it is common to find large
centers of population, such as Naples, continuously
inhabited for two-and-a-half millennia. Perhaps it
is fitting that one is home to the other.

2.

entry
Feb. 2003

San Carlo

I see that the
New York Times had an item yesterday about the
appropriateness of booing at the opera. In Naples,
that is not up for discussion. Let's assume that you
are a lowbrow knuckle-dragging cultural yahoo, the
kind of guy who would have met Mother Theresa and
said, "Hey, howya doin', Sister—here, have a beer!"
Then you will be happy to learn that the San Carlo
Theater (item 1, above) can still be as rough and
tumble as it was when Mark Twain was here in 1869. He
described the audience at San Carlo as "…three
thousand miscreants… [with]…all the vile, mean traits
there are".

[The entire excerpt on Naples
from The Innocents Abroad may be viewed by clicking here.]

San
Carlo has always been what they called in the days of vaudeville a "tough house".
Far from being the refined types we imagine opera-goers
to be—signalling severe disapproval by lofting their
eyebrows into little arches of arrogance and delicately
"aheming" once or twice— Neapolitans boo, whistle at,
and heckle the performers. If the performer is doing all
right, then the public heckle one another, just for
something to do. I have seen them cat–call the scenery
when the opening curtain went up, just to let the
singers quivering off–stage know what was in store for
them.

Way back in
1816, for example, Rossini
chose to premiere his Barber of Seville in
Rome instead of Naples although at the time he was
actually in charge of San Carlo. His opera was a
reworking of an already beloved opera of the same name
by the popular Neapolitan composer Giovanni Paisiello.
Rossini, aware that the hometown crowd resented his
efforts, thought that he might escape their wrath by
opening away from Naples. It didn't work. Paisiello
fans from Naples—"opera hooligans," to use a more
modern and thoroughly appropriate term—followed him
and disrupted the premiere of what has since come to
be regarded as one of the greatest works of the comic
opera genre. And later, in 1901, local critics panned
their own hometown boy, Enrico
Caruso, so severely that he took umbrage and
then took himself to America, never to sing in Naples
again.

In the 1960's,
the San Carlo audience was so unforgiving to the
soprano in Madame Butterfly, that she gave the
whole house the local version of the "finger"— the
"horns," right from center stage. One time,
tenor Franco Corelli actually ran off the stage at San
Carlo to get a heckler. And when the baritone in Pagliacci
delivered the opening line of the opera, a rhetorical
question to an on–stage audience assembled for a
carnival: "Si può?" (“May I begin?”), someone
in the real-life audience at San Carlo shouted
"No!" Similarly, a line towards the end of La
Boheme has the tenor singing, "I can no
longer stay." Someone in the upper boxes saw that as a
straight line for his own jibe: "So leave!"

And at the end of
the 1991/92 season, Francesco Cilea's Adriana
Lecouvreur went along for a few acts, not
sailing along, mind you, but not exactly sinking,
either. Local and little known tenor Nunzio Todisco
was singing opposite the great, if fading, prima
donna, soprano Raina Kabaivanska. Nothing special.
Maybe the costumes were a little out-of-epoch, that
sort of thing, but nothing that couldn't be salvaged
by some good singing. Then, third act: festive scene
in the villa of the Prince of Bouillon. The majordomo
gives the cue for the tenor's appearance by announcing
the arrival of the Count of Saxony, played by our main
man Nunzio: "Il conte di Sassonia!" Ta–taaa!
No Count. There follow a few very one–sided duets with
an imaginary tenor, before maestro Daniel Oren calls
down the curtain and sets off to find the real
thing.

Nunzio has been
sulking in the dressing room, having the classic opera
singer's breakdown, tantrum, paroxysm, fit of pique,
outburst of irascibility and display of ill temper. "I
can't go on!" he thunders, moans, laments and bleeds.
(Yes, a thesaurus is every opera critic's best
friend.) His crisis is due to his perception that the
crowd is stacked like the Tower of Pisa. They are
clearly on the soprano's side, he says, and out to
ambush him. His critics would later say that he was
having trouble with his part, so he just choked.
Anyway, maestro gives him a pep talk and trots him
back out for the rest of the opera, announcing to the
audience that in spite of "indisposition," the tenor
would valiantly carry on. That is like telling
vultures that the carrion delivery van is in the
neighborhood.

When he got back
out there, they heckled him. He gave as good as he
got, however, resorting, in kind, to foul language and
asking the Kabaivanska fans in one box how much they
had been paid to root for her. Arms were seen reaching
out from the wings frantically trying to wave him off
the stage. In vaudeville, they used a hook. At one
point, a fist-fight threatened to erupt between
opposing fans, and the glorious highlight of the
evening was the appearance of doubled–barrelled
"horns"—one of the most vulgar gestures you can make
in Italian society—a lady in a box was flashing both
hands out to the entire house, waggling them around to
one and all like obscene little antennae.

After the
opera, Nunzio was unrepentant. He called his leading
lady an "old hen" and said that the only reason she
had any fans at all was that her husband bussed them
in, getting them to attend by promising free pizza
afterwards. This was an unforgivable Blowing of
One's Cool. His contract was broken for the
remainder of the run, and an understudy carried on.
Also, he was sued by various parties for Defamation
of Character and Not Being Nice to a Soprano.